With a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, UC Santa Barbara materials scientist Stephen D. Wilson is on his way to finding the 21st century’s silicon, a key element used in the semiconductors of today’s electronics. His latest project aims to grow new exotic materials capable of driving technological and scientific advances to new levels.

BioSolar, Inc. (OTCQB: BSRC), developer of breakthrough energy storage technology and materials, today announced that the company has signed an agreement to extend the funding of a sponsored research program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (“UCSB”), to further develop its super battery technology.

The lead inventors of the technology are UCSB professor Dr. Alan Heeger, the recipient of a Nobel Prize in 2000 for the discovery and development of conductive polymers, and Dr. David Vonlanthen, a project scientist and expert in energy storage at UCSB.

The postage stamp-sized square of fused silica Kjeld Janssen is holding may not look like a whole lot to the untrained eye, but inside the clear chip lies the potential to improve how medicine and medical research is done.

“If you can integrate and automate an analysis technique into a chip, it opens doors to great applications,” said Janssen, a postdoctoral researcher in the Sumita Pennathur Lab at UC Santa Barbara.

In what marks a significant step forward for artificial intelligence, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have demonstrated the functionality of a simple artificial neural circuit. For the first time, a circuit of about 100 artificial synapses was proved to perform a simple version of a typical human task: image classification.

Mechanical engineering professor Megan Valentine has been chosen to receive a Fulbright Scholar Award. The highly sought award will enable her to conduct engineering research in France, her host country for several months until her return in January 2016.

When scientists develop a full quantum computer, the world of computing will undergo a revolution of sophistication, speed and energy efficiency that will make even our beefiest conventional machines seem like Stone Age clunkers by comparison.

But, before that happens, quantum physicists like the ones in UC Santa Barbara’s physics professor John Martinis’ lab will have to create circuitry that takes advantage of the marvelous computing prowess promised by the quantum bit (“qubit”), while compensating for its high vulnerability to environmentally-induced error.

Light: It’s all around us and is an integral part of our daily lives. Yet it continues to surprise us with its distinctive properties, such as how its various wavelengths can be utilized for imaging things invisible to the naked eye, or how it can store and transmit massive amounts of data, or how it can generate energy.

Like the shape-shifting robots of “Transformers” fame, a unique class of proteins in the human body also has the ability to alter their configuration. These so-named intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) lack a fixed or ordered three-dimensional structure, which can be influenced by exposure to various chemicals and cellular modifications.